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Regarding the NYT article, given all the blog triumphalism out there, particularly by conservative bloggers like Glenn Reynolds who crow over the demise of Old Media, I'll be interested to see if any of them pick up where newspapers have had to leave off, and will chase down witnesses and make FOIA requests in order to find the truth. It's very unlikely to come from the InstaPundit crowd, which tends to be pro- death penalty and comfortably assured that people who have been accused of murder probably committed it. But perhaps there will be better luck with the serious libertarians like Radley Balko, who are just as suspicious of government in its law enforcement role as they are when it interferes with the economy, or with liberal bloggers. Law prof bloggers like Douglas Berman would be great in this role as well.

Even if such New Media outlets want to report on potentially wrongful convictions, however, there still seems to be some legal uncertainty about whether they can just step into the shoes of newspapers. While a large, semi-mainstream blog like The Huffington Post might be seen as part of the Fourth Estate and thus charged with the Public Interest, I don't know if a one-man blogging operation like Sentencing Law & Policy would be. Maybe people who are concerned about this can lobby the HuffPost to start a wrongful convictions section?